Visual Orientation Inhomogeneity Based Convolutional Neural Networks

The details of oriented visual stimuli are better resolved when they are horizontal or vertical rather than oblique. This "oblique effect" has been researched and confirmed in numerous research studies, including behavioral studies and neurophysiological and neuroimaging findings. Although the "oblique effect" has influence in many fields, little research integrated it into computational models. In this paper, we try to explore this inhomogeneity of visual orientation based on Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image recognition. We validate that visual orientation inhomogeneity CNNs can achieve comparable performance with higher computational efficiency on various datasets. We can also get the conclusion that, compared with the cardinal information, oblique information is indeed less useful in natural color image recognition. Through the exploration of the proposed model on image recognition, we gain more understanding of the inhomogeneity of visual orientation. It also illuminates a wide range of opportunities for integrating the inhomogeneity of visual orientation with other computational models.